Spadina Avenue & Chinatown West

Spadina Avenue is a grand street, 160 feet wide (nearly fifty metres). William
Baldwin named it after his estate and house on the ridge at Davenport, about
two kilometres north of here. He called his property Spadina, after the native
term “espadinong,” meaning “hill.”

This page has four sections: Nineteenth Century Spadina Avenue, Jewish
Spadina, Chinatown West and Notes on three historic Spadina buildings:

Nineteenth Century Spadina Avenue

Dr. Baldwin began subdividing his property between Queen and Bloor in the
1820s, laying out Spadina Avenue as the central thoroughfare with a double
width of 132 ft. (later extended to 160 ft.) and an ornamental garden crescent
above College Street (where Old Knox College now stands). This tree lined
avenue would give a pleasant view from his estate on the bluff. This together
with the blocks of unequal size, was innovative planning for those days and
differed from the uniform grid of most of the city. Baldwin named streets for
family members: Robert, Phoebe, Sullivan, and Willcocks.

While Tremain’s map of 1860 shows this area as completely subdivided, Spadina
Avenue was still sparsely settled north of Queen street in the early 1870s.
Robert Denison had so little demand for his $350 estate lots, that he split
them into three, so starting high density development in this part of the
city. During the 1870s, working class British immigrants began to move into
the area. The area, like most of Toronto, was solidly British in character.
Local transportation also grew during the 1880s. The Toronto Street Railway
started horse-drawn streetcars on Spadina Avenue in 1880.

Jewish Spadina

In 1901 ninety per cent of Toronto’s citizens had their roots in Britain. The
largest ethnic group were Germans (three per cent); the next largest were Jews
at 1.9 per cent. In the early 1900s, Toronto’s Eastern European Jewish
community began moving into this part of the City. While the more affluent
settled east of Spadina, the poorer ones chose the streets to the west. About
80 percent of the city’s Jewish population of 35,000 lived in this area by the
1920s, worshipping at over 30 local synagogues. By 1931 Jews had become by far
the largest non-British group at 7.2 per cent (Italians were second at 2.1 per
cent); the city at large had dropped to eighty per cent British.

Rick Salutin, in his introduction to R. Donegan’s “Spadina Avenue,” tells us
that: “The age of industrial Spadina was the era of Jewish Spadina. Between
1901 and 1931 the population of Toronto grew by four times, from 156,000 to
631,000. The Jewish population grew fifteen times in the same years, from
3,000 to 45,000, as the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe crossed the Atlantic.
—– As late as the 1951 census, Jews still comprised the largest ethnic
component of Toronto at six per cent, with Ukrainians second at 3.5 per cent.
By this time the British were down to seventy per cent. —-(but) the Jewish
era on Spadina was coming to an end. Jews moved north as other immigrants
established themselves on the Avenue. —— Spadina has become about as
Chinese as it once was Jewish. —- It differs from Jewish Spadina. The
Chinese who came in the recent wave from Hong Kong brought a great deal of
capital with them. They’re the richest immigrants ever to enter Canada.”

Chinatown West

The information in the following section has been extracted from “Toronto’s
Chinatown” by Richard H. Tompson.

“Due to downtown redevelopment and the recent influx of thousands of recent
Chinese immigrants, the area known as Chinatown West has assumed increasing
importance as the center of the Chinese ethnic community.” It covers about two
square miles between Spadina Avenue and McCaul Street and between College
Street and Queen Street and is “an ideal location for Chinese residents who
are within walking distance of their jobs in the Chinese businesses and nearby
non-Chinese industries which employ Chinese labor.” “Chinatown West is as near
a complete community as one could expect to find in an urban context. In
addition to being a residential community in which an estimated 10,000 Chinese
now live, it has within its boundaries two primary schools, several social
agencies geared to immigrant needs, busy commercial streets on which are a
score of different kinds of services, and light industrial factories which
employ Chinese.”

Businesses on Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue here are almost exclusively
Chinese. In addition to scores of restaurants, groceries, and gift shops,
other Chinese businesses such as real estate and insurance brokers, travel
bureaus, bakeries, banks, pharmacies, physicians, lawyers, architects, book
shops, and so on are concentrated here. “Practically every conceivable service
necessary to a Chinese-speaking immigrant can be found on this strip of
Dundas. Spadina Avenue between College and Queen Streets.” Non-Chinese
businesses such as delicatessens, hardware stores, and clothing stores, are
scattered along Spadina. College and Queen Streets are also heavily
commercial, but have only a handful of Chinese businesses. Kensington Market,
Toronto’s famous year-round outdoor market also has several Chinese
businesses, but most either Portuguese or Jewish. Exempt for some large
restaurants geared to the tourist industry, Chinese businesses in Chinatown
West serve Chinese residents.

In the southwest corner of Chinatown West, on Spadina near Queen and south to
King Street, we find the “Garment District.” A clustering of garment factories
which originally were run by and employed Jewish labour, and now employ
thousands of Chinese. Employment like this is one reason why Chinese
immigrants prefer to live in this neighbourhood.

The building on the north corner of St. Andrew and Spadina, 350 - 358 Spadina
Avenue, was designed for W.E. Dunn in 1890 by William G. Storm, who was also
the architect of University College and St. Andrew’s Church. This building has
held a number of businesses. One Stitsky’s Imports was here for over thirty
years. Rotman’s Men’s Shops was at 350 for more than fifty years. The name
Rotman’s is still obvious in the tiles above the door at the south end of the
building. The top of the north wall of 358 shows a painted advertisement for
Stitsky’s.

The Labour Lyceum, 346 Spadina Avenue, was the centre of Toronto labour
activity from 1928 to 1968. “The Toronto Labour Lyceum Association, Limited”,
was incorporated in 1913 to serve trade unions that were not affiliated with
the Communist Party. When the American feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman
died in Toronto in 1940 her body lay in state here before being shipped to
Chicago for burial.

The building at the north-east corner of Spadina and Dundas was once an
important Yiddish theatre, The Standard. Today it houses a branch of the Royal
Bank and sundry small businesses. The Standard Theatre was designed by
architect Benjamin Brown and opened on August 18, 1921. In the 1920’s it was
the centre of Yiddish theatre in Toronto. From 1921 to 1935 people came to the
Standard for fine Yiddish theatre, lectures, meetings, and boxing matches. In
1929 a meeting at the Standard to commemorate the death of Lenin ended in a
police raid. Toronto police kept a close watch on Communist activity in the
neighbourhood and speakers at this meeting had broken the law using a language
other than English.

This theatre knew many incarnations. By 1935 demand for live Yiddish theatre
had fallen off so the Standard became a movie theatre, the Strand. At the end
of World War II it became burlesque house, the Victory, until 1975. It was a
popular, and notorious hang-out for students and artists. Rick Salutin tells
us “It used to be the Standard, a Yiddish theatre, and political-cultural
projects like “Eight Men Speak” went on its stage. In the mid 1930’s. it
became the Strand, a movie house. After the Second World War it was renamed,
naturally, the Victory and became a burlesque house. When I was growing up it
was a centrepiece of adolescence. Since we lacked any comparison, the strip
shows seemed like the real thing. We didn’t know how prissy they were in the
Toronto way. G-strings and pasties were obligatory; numerous rules restrained
the performances.” After renovations, the Golden Harvest Theatre opened as a
Chinese language theatre. It then became the Mandarin Theatre and finally in a
way, a mall.